


if you promise to stay conscious i will try to do the same

by scenedenial



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Ambiguous Relationship, Assassian AU, Blood, Canon Divergent, Contract Killers, Hitmen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Kissing, M/M, Possessiveness, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Substance Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts, Trigger Warnings: Murder, Unspoken Love, Weapons, fucked up boys with fucked up feelings, past trauma, they’re adults obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 01:22:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19842613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scenedenial/pseuds/scenedenial
Summary: The doctor has a soft voice and wears too much blush. She asks him about his eating, his anxiety levels, his headaches, his reflex times. About his partner.“Teeth is...” Theo bites at his lower lip, never knowing what answer to this question they want. Boris—Teeth—is a brutal shot. His knuckles are always raw and bruised from going hand-to-hand. He drinks black tea with honey and is constantly taking the piss. Sometimes, Theo gets up to him vomiting behind a closed door. Sometimes, he jerks awake in the night and cries so hard that Theo thinks it may never stop. “He’s solid.”Theo wonders like hell what Boris says about him.





	if you promise to stay conscious i will try to do the same

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings are in tags!! Please be safe! (Title is from the bright eyes songs Lua)

“Don’t leave me rotting in a hospital, okay?” Boris’s tone is lighthearted enough, but Theo can hear the thin strain at the underbelly of it as he unrolls a length of gauze and presses it to Boris’s ribs. Jesus. The blood, thick and a fake-looking red, seeps through the material and onto Theo’s gloved hands in a matter of seconds. He grits his teeth and pushes down harder, feeling his fingers shift over the thin bones of Boris’s chest. Boris folds one of his pale, cold-fingered hands over Theo’s. “Promise me, _Potter._ You unplug me.” 

“Yeah, okay, sure.” Boris looks downright _languid_ at first glance, lounging on his back on the scratchy mattress that’s been stripped of its hotel-brand sheets, but he’s holding tension in his shoulders and core and temples. Theo rummages through the bag he’s kneeling beside with his cleaner hand. 

“You know I have to take this to HQ, right?” His voice is low and irritated because, _fuck_ , this is just like Boris. Always reckless. Always getting a little too close, always moving a little too unhurriedly, as if he can’t sprint like there’s fire at his heels when he wants to. “You’re fucking stupid.” 

“Yah, yah.” The Ukrainian lilt in his drawl always gets thicker when he’s tired, stressed, hurt—when he’s off. “Tell your handler whatever the fuck you want.” 

Then Boris’s eyes are closed, _the end_ , and it’s like Theo is working on a stranger as he pours hydrogen peroxide into the long, ugly wound spanning the length between his right armpit and sternum. Boris hardly flinches.

—

Boris breaks operation’s first rule not ten minutes after they meet. Theo is still trying hard to recall the details of the file they’d given him, the one that listed the height (5’9), weight (120), nationality (?), and blood type (AB, he thinks) of the 25 year old called Teeth, when he leans in conspiratorially and introduces himself by his real name. 

Theo, nervous in the best of moments (few and far between in this line of work), has to fight the urge to turn around, storm up to his handler, and demand a different, less fucking _careless_ partner. 

Potter and Teeth. Theo and Boris. 

Boris’s nose is crooked like it broke and never healed right. He has freckles and a mop of greasy black curls and the posture and jerky-fingered tics of an addict (Theo would know).

Maybe it’s fine, so long as neither of them ever slip up in front of leadership. Maybe. 

—

“I get it.” Boris says, drying his hair with a threadbare towel. (At the start of this all, Theo had sort of expected, like, hotel rooms with Jacuzzis and champagne in ice buckets. Had wrongly assumed that ops would be shelling out just a bit for their accommodations, for the place they’d clean up after blowing the brains out of another east coast kingpin.) “For the glasses. Harry Potter.” He holds his hands to his face, owl-eyed, mimicking Theo’s round lenses. There’s an opaque, spreading bruise on Boris’s jaw from a west side job last week, the last valiant effort of some poor, doomed asshole. 

“They’re creative, huh?” The alias still irritates Theo after two years, though he supposes it could be worse. He’s never even read _Harry Potter._

“Tell me about it.” Boris sneers from across the room, showing off a row of off-kilter, discolored molars, sharp like kitten teeth. “Hilarious.”

—

They talk to psychiatrists every week, sitting in a blank-walled, windowless room. Part of the package. 

Theo is wearing off-duty clothes—a sweatshirt three sizes too big for him, jeans that are busted at the knees and that are actually Boris’s, because that’s how this always starts to work after a while. He taps two fingers against the cold grey of the interrogation table. 

(It’s not technically an interrogation, but it might as well be. Theo hasn’t stopped feeling like he’s on the very edge of being declared _mentally unfit_ and tossed out into the street since the first moment he sat in here. Like one slip of the tongue will prove to everyone that he’s well and truly fucked.)

The doctor has a soft voice and wears too much blush. She asks him about his eating, his anxiety levels, his headaches, his reflex times. About his partner. 

“Teeth is...” Theo bites at his lower lip, never knowing what answer to this question they want. Boris— _Teeth_ —is a brutal shot. His knuckles are always raw and bruised from going hand-to-hand. He drinks black tea with honey and is constantly taking the piss. Sometimes, Theo gets up to him vomiting behind a closed door. Sometimes, he jerks awake in the night and cries so hard that Theo thinks it may never stop. “He’s solid.”

Theo wonders like hell what Boris says about him. 

—

Boris keeps his guns in one of those metal, lockable suitcases, all jumbled together with loose shells rattling between them like he couldn’t care less. Once, while clicking a magazine into place, he told Theo that the more time he spends looking at them, the more he feels like he’s about to lose his mind. The more it feels real. That he uses them when he needs to, then tries to forget them.

Once, high on illicit weed, ( _no substance use on site or in the field, no exceptions_ ), Boris tells Theo about his dad. About the blizzards and black ice of Russian winters, about huddling over a half-broken electric heater and drinking canned soups instead of starving. About the scar under his left eye and the barely-perceptible hunch of his shoulder where it was dislocated in another life.

And Theo thinks he understands. 

—

Theo has PTSD. During their first meeting, the psychiatrist listens to him talk for all of three minutes before shaking her head with all this awful pity in her eyes and scrawling something down on her notepad. 

He takes pills, twice a day. They’re administered by his handler when they’re at the base, and by Boris when they’re on the road. One of the duties of a partner, and the reason they wouldn’t let Theo into the field alone. It’s bullshit, really; a few brushes with trauma, a few night terrors, a few lapses where he woke up in the medical ward with the worst headache of his life, stomach pumped of opioids, vomiting and listless and wanting to _die die die_.

Anyways. It’s ironic, slightly, because Boris is a heroin addict and Boris’s hands shake and Boris crawls into Theo’s bed some nights, sweating and too fucked up to speak.

Theo runs his finger over the track marks on Boris’s arm and laughs at the fact that he’s the one with Theo’s Zoloft all under lock and key in his pocket, the one who leans over him as he’s waking up and as he’s going to sleep and slips a pill under his tongue like it’s all the most normal thing in the world.

Some nights, Theo lays on his side in a hotel twin bed and watches Boris’s face in the moonlight, watches his eyelashes twitch and his nostrils flare and narrow with his breaths. 

—

Theo’s knees are aching with chill as he kneels, stock still and silent, behind the concrete barrier separating the roof from a 50-story fall. The wind is whipping hard enough in the dark, heavy air that he can see Boris’s hair blowing about his face from through the AK-47’s sight, its cold metal pressing a ring into the skin beneath Theo’s eye. Boris is illuminated by the thin dome of a streetlight, smoking and leaned up against a brick wall across the street from where Theo waits. His shoulders are beginning to ache from holding the gun at the ready, waiting, hoping. 

When they got out of the getaway car, nondescript dark hoodies zipped to their chins, a pistol and a knife secured in the waistband of Boris’s jeans and a backpack filled with gauze, tape, and two extra clips hanging off Theo’s back, it was like coming back to something easy. Something understandable, something with memorized nuance and subtlety and not a hair out of place. It’s the way Theo likes it. More or less the reason he ended up here in the first place. 

His gloved fingers flex on the trigger. Any moment now, according to the meticulously detailed itinerary his handler had read and read aloud again until Theo could say it back to her without a stumble. At 2:30 am, the club on the corner of second and Thomson closes. 6 minutes after that, according to months of observation carried out by ops, their target will be in the range of Theo’s gun, living out his last seconds in a drunken blur on a dirty back street. 

Boris speaks into the microphone that’s hidden beneath his collar, even though they aren’t supposed to do that. Technically. With Boris, almost everything can be a technicality. 

“You cold? All the way up there?” Boris’s voice is soft and calm. Every time they get their heart rates and blood pressures taken during the simulations, his are miles beneath Theo’s. 

“Fine.” Theo says as quietly as he can. “You good?”

“You know it. What is the time like?” Theo sees him scuff the toe of his work boot against the concrete, blurry and enlarged through the glass.

“2 minutes until action. Supposedly.”

“Two.” Theo hears his fingers against the mic, then the sound of his breathing cut out. Better safe than sorry. 

It all happens in a blur of movement where Theo’s brain switches off. He watches the guy—big, tall, wearing a white t-shirt even in the cold—amble into Boris’s circle of light, stop amiably as Boris’s mouth begins to move. He sees him fumble for a lighter in his pocket, sees Boris lean towards him minutely with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. And then, in a tiny, controlled explosion, Boris throws his right hand into the air, first and third fingers to the sky, and dives to the concrete.

Theo takes the guy down with the first shot. 

—

Back at HQ, they detail the hit separately, sitting in tiny rooms, still reeking of gunsmoke and tin-sharp blood. 

“2:35 am. We were out within three minutes of the kill. Rendezvoused in the parking garage of the stakeout building.”

“Did your partner, at any point, put his hands on the target?” Theo thinks back to it, to Boris leaning in with his body still angled away. 

“No.” 

“Were there any visible witnesses?”

“No.” _If there had been, we wouldn’t have left them alive_ , he doesn’t add. 

“Was the gun disposed of at the predetermined drop site?”

“Yes. It was out of my hands by three.” 

“Any issues to report on?”

Theo thinks of Boris’s voice through the mic, as light as if they were popping around the corner for some takeout. “Nothing that comes to mind.”

—

They can’t sleep before they complete and relay their post-mission physicals, through Theo wants nothing more than to drop into bed and pass out like the dead for the next twelve hours, and the emotion is clearly mirrored in Boris’s drooping, black-ringed eyes. 

Boris lays stretched out on the bed, eyes half-closed and breathing deep and noisy. He’s stripped down to his boxers, every light in he room on so Theo can examine his body properly for scrapes, bruises, blood between the smattered freckles and track marks and scars.

Boris is shipshape aside from a small, round burn mark on his palm from when the guy fell, his lighter still flickering. Theo works like a surgeon, gloves on, antibiotics spread on the night table, gauze cut and trimmed to size. 

Theo pours the disinfectant onto the corner of a towel, dabs it as gently as he can against the reddened skin, ignoring as best he can that Boris’s eyes are trained on him with an intensity that would make him shy away if he wasn’t used to it.

Boris is all lurid and shameless, everything he’s ever thinking all written out on his face, ready to push past dry lips and out into the air between them. Sometimes Theo thinks that leadership does this on purpose, sticks people with the least in common together and forces them into hotel rooms by themselves for 72 hours on end. Sometimes Theo thinks his handler suspects something as she presses a finger into a bruise on his chest. 

Theo doesn’t have time to reach for the rolled-up tube of ointment on the side table before Boris has his wrist bound, death-grip tight in his own fingers, crooked bottom tooth hooking into top lip. 

They look at each other, and the fluorescent bathroom light glints off the whites of Boris’s eyes. Boris, holding him in place, (it’s not like Theo couldn’t twist away with minimal effort if he wanted to— _if_ he wanted to), shoves his injured palm towards Theo’s mouth. 

“Boris.” His skin smells like sweat, acrid and sweet, mingling with cigarette smoke and the copper of singed flesh. Theo sits back on his ankles, the mattress sagging underneath them, and licks down over the salty skin of the burn mark. 

Boris gasps very softly, then chuckles, the sound rasping up from the back of his throat. Theo glances up, and their eyes lock. 

Theo presses his lips, wet and slightly open, around the burn. Boris palms warm and heavy at the back of his head. 

“You did good tonight.” He says, voice solid and foreign above Theo. Theo fights the urge to crawl over the sheets, straddle him, keep him strapped down and safe and uninjured for the rest of time. 

“You did too.” 

Theo dabs the antiseptic onto Boris’s palm, secures it with gauze and tape, snaps a picture on the Polaroid to include in his report to HQ. Boris lies still, arm folded beneath his head, tranquil enough that Theo can’t tell whether or not he’s sleeping.

—

Theo has never been good at this part, all his nerves too jumpy and jangled to be held down under a glaring light with an IV in his arm. Boris stands over him, cold hands like metal around his wrists, restraining him. His lips are moving, no sound coming out. If Theo didn’t know him like he does, he might think he was praying. The doctor is leaning over him, needle glinting between her fingers.

The drag of string in the swollen flesh of his split, gushing lip and chin makes Theo’s stomach turn. He closes his eyes and tries to think of something, anything else. Lands on last night, when he and Boris sat knee to knee on one bed, Boris yelling and laughing as Theo fumbled another hand to some endlessly complicated Russian card game. 

Boris leans down, mouth beside Theo’s ear. His breath is warm and uneven.

“Almost over, Potter. Almost over.”

—

They send him back to the hotel with a bottle of painkillers the size of the first digit on his pointer finger, with strict instructions to Boris to wake him every four hours and jam one down his throat. 

Back in the dim, messy room, Boris collects slivers of ice into a washcloth and holds it to Theo’s mouth. The wound, precise and clean as it is (it was a knife, a stupid logistical error of getting too close too soon), burns like fire. 

Boris wakes him up at three in the morning, coaxes a pill into him, then kisses him so hard that a stitch pops and the blood flows freely again, reddening Theo’s teeth and bare chest. He wouldn’t complain even if he wanted to. 

Boris presses gauze to his lip until the blood clots, looking equal parts proud and ashamed, like an animal that has dragged in some suffocating piece of prey. He puts Theo back to bed, his back to the wall, and crawls in beside him. 

“Better this way.” He says, and Theo presses his forehead into the fragrant space between Boris’s collarbone and neck. 

—

It doesn’t matter that Theo has half a foot and 50 pounds on Boris, because when their eyes meet like this it levels him, makes him small. Boris is the most intense person Theo has ever met, and it’s written into every muscle and grin and wink that he tosses Theo’s way. 

They eat from the complimentary breakfast buffet after the dining room has cleared out well enough; Theo drinks black coffee and eats two waffles and a yogurt, reminded of the singular time he and his mother had spent the night in a hotel, an adventure. Boris prods at his hand on the table, looks at him quizzically. Theo tries to reset his face, because he doesn’t want to talk about it. 

He doesn’t want to think about what his mother would say if she saw him now.

—

At the shooting range, Theo stands with his hips angled and feet apart and hits the bullseye, every single time. It makes sense, because he is the sniper and Boris is ground crew, but it doesn’t stop Boris’s face from crumpling into something like jealousy as his bullets ping off the edges of the target. 

Theo pulls off his headphones, turns to Boris.

“Don’t worry about it.”

It’s not the right thing to say. Boris’s shoulders stiffen, and he turns back to the target and lets the whole magazine fly. _Pop pop pop pop pop._ Not one hits the center. 

—

Boris flies home for a week. Theo has a solo mission—a simple one, take out an aging mob combatant through his window as he sleeps—and their room at HQ feels so giant and empty that he takes to sitting in the empty bathtub to read through his handler’s notes, just to avoid looking at the unoccupied bed. 

The morning before he’s set to go, he calls Boris’s burner phone. It’s against the rules, and rules are rules, but Theo’s hands are itching and itching and he feels lonelier than he has since the bus back to NYC, that dog curled up in a shopping bag at his feet. 

“Yah?” Boris answers on the sixth or seventh ring, sounding suspicious and sleepy. 

“It’s... Potter.” Theo can hear Boris sigh, shift. 

“Things are okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s okay. I just... it’s weird.”

“What is?” 

“I...” Theo can’t say it. “It’s weird to be in our room by myself.” 

“I’ll be back Tuesday. For the Andersson hit.” 

“I know.” 

“Listen, Potter. Good luck tonight, yah? Do not be an idiot.” Theo is about to respond, something about how if either of them is an idiot it sure isn’t _him_ , when he hears a woman’s voice, high and lilting, in the background through the speaker. He hears Boris shush her.

Ah.

“Are you...?” It’s not a question Theo should be allowed to ask. So he doesn’t. “Never mind. See you Tuesday.”

“Wait, Potter—” Theo hangs up on him. 

—

The hit should be easy, _is_ easy, but Theo’s head is buzzing and he’s too distractedly reckless for his own good, and when he swings down to the window, tethered from the roof, he hits it hard at the wrong angle. The impact is loud, and he hisses a curse through his teeth.

The man, the target, sits up in bed. He’s balding and wrinkled. Before his eyes focus all the way on Theo, Theo has his gun up. The glass shatters, shards flying back into his hands and face. The man falls back onto the bed; blood splatters onto the wall behind him. 

Theo doesn’t waste time hauling himself back up the rope with his bloodied hands. 

—

“Jesus, Theo.” Is the first thing Boris says after they shuttle him through a re-entry physical and the psychiatrist’s office and into the room where Theo sits with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall. “You look fucked.” 

Theo’s face is scabbed like a meth addict’s, the aftermath of two hours on his back in the medical ward while they dug tiny shards of glass out of his skin. 

“Good to see you too.” 

Boris is wearing a black turtleneck with dark, well-fitting trousers and loafers. His hair is clean and shining. He looks like a different person. Theo drops his head back against the wall. 

“How was your break?” Theo can’t keep the hard edge out of his voice, knows he sounds petulant and whiny like a high schooler.

“Fine. I saw a movie.”

“Which one?” 

“Inglorious Bastards.” Boris scuffs the heel of his foot along the blandly patterned carpet.

“Mm.” Tarantino. 

Boris walks across the room to the sink, fills a fingerprinted glass, drains it in several swallows. Theo watches his Adam’s apple bob, up and down, and has an idea. 

“Boris. Sit down.” Boris sets the glass down and turns, eyes incredulous.

“Why?”

“Gotta check you.” Theo feels hot and cold, a little bit off the rails. 

“They just looked at me, idiot. It’s good.” 

“ _Sit._ ” 

This time, Boris doesn’t protest. He just looks at Theo bleakly for one long moment, then crosses the room and sits gingerly on the edge of the bed that’s closest to Theo’s place on the floor.

“You are... control freak.” Boris’s voice is even, but there’s a waver to it that Theo’s trained ears pick up. 

“And you’re an asshole.”

“I—” Boris splutters, then falls silent. Theo stands, wiping his hands on his jeans. When did they start to sweat? 

Boris is sitting up straight, palms facedown on the bed on either side of his thighs. He stares up at Theo, gaze unbroken. 

“Take off your shirt.” Theo walks around to the desk, pulls a pair of latex gloves from the box. Boris watches his hands as he snaps them on, all focus and fiery eyes. He nods minutely, pulls his turtleneck up from the bottom and shuffles out of it. It hits the floor, a soft mass of black fabric at Theo’s feet. 

Boris’s chest is all ribs and iridescent, skim-milk skin, freckled and scarred. 

Quarter sized bruises from his neck to his breastbone, scraped-in and unmistakable. Boris stares back at Theo, has the nerve to ask _so what?_ with his eyes. 

“Did you fuck her?” 

“What do you think?” Boris practically spits it, mouth twisting into something like a smirk. 

Theo gets a palm on Boris’s chest, right in the center of the mess of hickeys, and pushes him back so he’s laying flat on the bed. It scares him a little bit, the way he feels, what’s in his head. The way he wants to get his fingers around Boris’s neck and squeeze. 

Theo clambers up onto the bed, straddles Boris’s thighs with his own. He leans forward and pushes two gloved fingers into one of the biggest bruises, presses in hard enough that Boris flinches. 

“Sadist.” He hisses into Theo’s face, but he’s smiling.

“Whore.” For a second, Boris’s expression goes blank and Theo thinks he’s taken it too far. 

“Fuck you.” Boris, in one fluid motion, spits in Theo’s face and flips him onto the bed, knocking the wind out of him. 

It stuns him, empties him of any fight he had burning in his veins, and takes him down further when Boris leans in and laps his own saliva off Theo’s cheek. _Jesus fucking Christ._

“That’s how you want to play this?” Boris says, voice dangerous and soft. “We can play this.”

When they kiss it’s more like a hit. Theo sees stars, forces a hand up into Boris’s hair and pulls. Boris bites at his top lip, hard enough that Theo tastes blood. 

“I don’t like it when you leave.” Theo pants as their teeth clash. He tastes blood and salt and cigarette smoke. He feels lightheaded and overheated and _okay_. “You should stay. Stay with me.”

“Yah?” Boris hooks his fingers under the waistband of Theo’s pants and tugs. 

“Yeah.”

—

They fuck and don’t talk about it. It’s a pattern. They fuck without scratching each other up, without teething bruises into thin skin, so they won’t be found out during physicals. Theo pulls Boris’s hair just to hear him moan and moan. They fuck in the shower, scalding water running in rivulets over their faces and limbs until it goes cold, washing away the evidence as it occurs. 

Boris squeezes Theo’s thighs as he slips the Zoloft into his mouth. Theo licks him clean like a cat when they return from missions bloody and bruised. Theo knows how to curl his fingers and take him apart. 

Boris catches him on the stairs as he returns to the ground and Theo goes for the roof, both of them with weapons tucked into their belts, strapped under their hoodies. 

“Careful.” Boris says, eyes dark and open.

“I should be saying that to you.”

They kiss, Boris’s teeth dragging over the scar on Theo’s lip. He tastes like toothpaste and baby aspirin. 

Back at HQ during the debrief, Theo stares straight at his handler while he says _”my relationship with Teeth is strictly professional in nature.”_

—

When it happens, Theo isn’t ready. He isn’t expecting it. 

He sees Boris hit the ground at the wrong angle and stay there. He shoots, wildly, sees the combatant go down beside him. 

And then Theo is running down the stairs, fast enough that his legs and brain aren’t moving in tandem, fast enough that he has to catch the railing to keep from shooting onward into empty space. His fingers fly up to his earpiece, switch it on.

“Teeth is down.” He says to his handler, voice shaky and broken. “He’s down.”

 _Stay where you are._ She says. _Wait for backup._ Theo doesn’t listen. 

He knows that throwing the door and sprinting out into the street, out where anyone could see him, across to where two motionless bodies lay with a gun barely hidden beneath his jacket, is the worst possible idea. He does it anyways. 

He checks the target first, can’t bring himself to even look at Boris until he has to. His bullets went straight through the guy’s head. Gore has splashed the brick wall behind them, stomach-turningly satisfying. 

There’s a knife (not Boris’s knife) on the concrete beneath Theo, three inches of clotted redness coating the blade. He drops to his knees beside Boris. 

“ _Teeth_.” Theo whispers, shaking Boris’s shoulders as roughly as he dares. It doesn’t take a trained eye to see the place at his torso where the fabric of his hoodie is darkened and sticky, where the blood is spreading steadily. “Jesus, come on. _Boris._ ” Theo knows his mic is on, knows his handler can hear the transgression. He doesn’t care. 

Theo is desperate, ready to scream aloud and lay down on his back in the lamplit street to await his brutal, jail-celled fate, when Boris’s left hand twitches. 

“Movement.” He hisses into his mic. “We have movement.” 

“Don’t try to move him.” His handler says in her stern, even voice. Theo wishes he could listen to her. “A car is on its way.” 

Theo gets an arm under Boris’s lolling neck, the other behind his knees, and hoists him off the blood soaked concrete, away from the smell of death and decay

“It’s okay.” Theo whispers to his stilled, silent frame. Boris feels too small in his arms, like something is seeping out of him, doing him away. “ _Fuck._ ” Theo is crying, doesn’t realize it until a teardrop lands glossy on Boris’s pale, unresponsive expanse of neck. “It‘s going to be okay.”

Boris comes to in the car, all heavy steel and tinted windows, thrashing in Theo’s lap. He rolls over and throws up a mess of blood onto Theo’s thighs. The driver turns back to them, eyes flashing, and says _almost there_. Theo holds Boris’s head, runs shaking fingers through his sweat-soaked hair, prays and prays and prays under his breath. He has a fistful of gauze pressed into the stab wound in Boris’s stomach, ragged and bruising around the edges, seeping blood in a sickeningly endless trickle. _Please make this stop._

In the medical ward, Theo refuses to leave Boris’s side. His shoulder is jacked, probably dislocated, from firing the gun in a panic, but he doesn’t feel it until someone on the staff comes up behind him and forces it back into place. Hardly feels it after the fact, either, once they have it up in a sling; his eyes are trained on Boris’s face, which is so pale and drained of life that it makes Theo want to vomit. 

They have to open Boris up further, repair whichever internal organ was torn open by the knife, then stitch it all up again. It’s four hours in the operating room, Theo’s knees locked, lightheaded and shaking. When his handler finally manages to force him out into the hallway and onto a hard-backed chair, he’s sure he’s going to pass out.

“Drink this.” She presses a paper cup of something hot into his palm. He downs it without tasting it, feeling minutely better when he’s finished. “He’s going to be fine.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean it.” Her hair is long and curly, and she squats in front of him in a motion that, all of a sudden, reminds him of his mother comforting him all those years ago. His eyes go hot. “I won’t pretend to know how it is between you two.”

Theo tries to speak in protest, but she raises a palm to silence him.

“All I know is that you guys work well together. You’re a team that we need. And he’s going to be fine, okay, so you don’t have to worry about any of it. Got it?”

“Got it.” She cuffs him gently on his uninjured shoulder and he wants to cry.

“Go get some rest. I’ll come get you when he’s awake.” 

—

Theo doesn’t expect that he’ll be able to sleep for a minute, but the second he’s stripped of his bloodied clothes and laying facedown on the bed, he’s out. 

He doesn’t dream.

—

Boris is sitting up in the hospital bed when Theo walks in, shirtless and pale but with a familiar, heart-wrenchingly _correct_ gleam in his eyes.

“Thought you saw the last of me, huh?” His voice is raspy, quiet. “Surprise.”

“You fucking idiot.” Theo crosses the room to his bed in a few quick strides. “You asshole.” 

“Scared you?”

“Nah. Just fucked up my clothes.”

“Liar.” Boris’s smile is toothy and shit-eating. Theo feels something in his chest come undone, something propelling him to lean down and press his forehead to Boris’s. His hands come up to the back of Theo’s neck. 

“ _Asshole._ ” Theo repeats, because he doesn’t quite know how to say what he wants to.

—

Boris is on bed rest. Theo makes him tea, changes the dressings on his wound, lets him choose the television channel. The hotel room HQ set up for the _recuperation period_ is nicer than any they’ve been in before. (“You think they feel bad?” Boris asked as Theo wheeled him in.)

They sleep a lot, drawing the blackout curtains and curling up in one bed under the pretense of Theo _keeping an eye on things_. They order room service. Theo takes pain pills for his shoulder and administers stronger ones to Boris. 

Theo washes Boris’s hair, partly because he can’t do it himself, partly because he likes feeling Boris under his hands, knowing he’s safe and whole. 

“What would I do without you?” Boris says, jokes, as Theo pulls a sweater over his curly head and helps him settle back into the pillows.

“You’d die.” 

“Most likely.” 

They don’t kiss, but they don’t have to.

**Author's Note:**

> AH I hope you guys liked this!! I would love love to hear what y’all think in the comments :’) thank u for reading my shit it means so much to me!!


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